(Transcript)

tl;dr

“Tell me about yourself.” It’s a question you can be expected to answer in every single interview for the rest of your life. It comes in a few slight variations, including: “Tell me a little bit about your background,” and “Walk me through your resume.”

Let’s call your answer to this question (and all of its variations) your “personal pitch.” Throughout this lesson, I also refer to it as simply your “pitch.”

As you’ll soon learn, the interview can be won or lost in the first few moments, and the pitch is the “court” for that “game” to take place.

Why do companies ask you for a personal pitch?

Hopefully, they’ve already looked at your resume. (Though, it’s not guaranteed.) But let’s assume they have, why would they ask this question?

Here’s the reality no one will tell you. Interviewers are busy. Most candidates are duds. This question is asked in order for the interviewer to determine “Is this interview going to be worth my time?” If the candidate is going to be a dud, I’d rather know that sooner.

If you need any further convincing that first impressions are powerful, we’d remind you of a research study where random people–with no domain experience the interview assessed–were asked to watch an interview for a job and predict whether or not the candidate would get an offer. Surprisingly, these random people were really good at accurately predicting who got the offers and who didn’t, after watching the interviews in full. So, the researchers would provide them with smaller slices of data to see if they could still make accurate predictions. They sliced it smaller and smaller until eventually what they ended up with was the first few seconds of the interview–the candidate introducing themselves–was all the random observers needed to predict who got offers. Not only that, but the predictions were accurate even when watched on mute.

First impressions are powerful, and they aren’t just about the words you say. They are about your presence, your body language, and your delivery. Most of those specifics are outside the scope of this course. Now, we have a shared understanding that first impressions are important. And your pitch is your opportunity to make a first impression.

Small note: It’s outside the scope of this course to teach you how to send cold outreach (emails, DMs, etc) to get interviews. Yet as a bonus, many ideas in this lesson can be applied to cold outreach!

The Don’ts and Do’s of your pitch, with example pitches

Don’t

This list is nonexhaustive, there’s an innumerable number of ways candidates can mess up a pitch. All of these don’ts, when committed, can  be microsignals for downleveling. Avoid them at all costs!

• Make your pitch too lean. Because then, they can ask you about anything.
• Don’t monologue. Talk for too long and your interviewer will be bored.
• Start your pitch with “My name is Kevin…” It makes you seem very junior and scripted.
• Flex your tech chops by dumping a laundry list of technologies. A pitch is not a job description. You add no value with this laundry list, unless every technology you mention is used in the company you're talking to’s tech stack. Even then, it’s probably more optimal to say “I’ve used your exact tech stack for X years now.”
• Go down the rabbit hole of why you got into the field. If you have professional experience for your target role, there’s rarely a good reason to mention this at all. And if you’re looking to get your foot in the door, it’s okay to mention it, but don’t linger for more than 1 sentence.
• Don’t be sensational. Don’t show your passion with words like “coolest.” Instead, use “cool.” It’s more measured and accomplishes the same goal.

Example pitch which commits the “Don’ts”

Note: Keep in mind, the candidate giving these pitches is interviewing at Google for a senior-level software engineering position.

My name is Kevin, and I graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Computer Science.

I got into computers because my dad bought me a C++ book in middle school.  That was like 20 years ago, and my passion has not let up. I view software development as a giant puzzle, and I never get tired of trying to solve these puzzles.

I work at Microsoft now. My tech stack is .Net/C#, GraphQL, Visual Basic, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft SQL Server. I'm working on Microsoft MSN, which you’ve probably used at least once in your life. The funny thing about MSN is that I used it as a teenager and then it sort of dropped off my radar for like 10 years and then I started using it again when I started working on it. And so, if you have Edge on your computer, if you're a Windows user you're probably going to have the first thing the first web browser on your computer when you open a new tab you're basically seeing my work. And so one of the recent work examples I had there was introducing a new feed that optimized the loading time.

Before that I worked at LinkedIn. At LinkedIn, I used technologies such as Vanilla JavaScript, jQuery, Ember, Java, Amazon S3, Memcached, and Hadoop. One of the coolest things I did there was introducing a quick help widget on LinkedIn's flagship. And so if you go to LinkedIn today and you click on your “Me” menu you're going to see your dropdown when you click help the thing that pops up is the widget that I built. I built the core functionality where you can move it around the screen without any lag in Vanilla JavaScript, I actually had to go beneath the framework that was used at the time it was Ember I'm not sure if they still use that i had to write that in Vanilla to get these speeds and I was at LinkedIn for 6 years.

I have plenty of other interesting projects to talk about, but do you want me to go further in the past or is this enough? By the way, this covers about eight years of my work experience.

Do

You’ve seen the suboptimal example, and the problems that cause it. Now, let’s optimize.

• If you’re deadset on a specific level you’re targeting, introduce yourself as an engineer of that level. For example, the first words of my pitch could be “I’m a senior engineer…”
• Treat your pitch as if the rest of the interview could take place solely on follow-up of whatever you mention in your personal pitch. Leave breadcrumbs in the direction you would like the conversation to go. Consider breadcrumbs as “points to make your interviewer curious enough to learn more.”
• To use an analogy, it’s like an interview is a “meal two people can have at a really good restaurant" and the personal pitch is a “well designed menu that gets you excited and hungry for that meal–ideally, it makes your mouth water for the meal you’ll soon have.”
• Flex your tech chops with lean and dense descriptions of projects, or naming buckets of the type of work your projects fall into.
• Give a sense of scale and/or complexity by injecting some impact or metric statements.
• Take chances–solely in order to be memorable–break the rules. This is more important if you’re a junior engineer looking to get your first engineering job (foot in the door), and even more important if you have a nontraditional background.
• Personalize it to the company with details that are so specific to them, if you said it in an interview for a different opportunity, it wouldn’t make sense.
• Proactively answer questions you’re sure to be asked later in the interview–even if you’re only partly answering them in your pitch. The most obvious questions you can provide some signal for are “what are you looking for in your next opportunity” and/or “Why do you want to work for our company.”

Example pitch which commits the “Do’s”

Note: Again, assume this candidate is interviewing for a senior-level software engineering role at Google.

I’m a senior software engineer, currently at Microsoft. If you use Edge as your browser, when you open a new tab you're seeing my work. One recent project was introducing a news feed that optimized the loading time and ended up bringing in $1.6 million of additional annual ad revenue. The greatest technical challenge on that project was performance optimization.

Before Microsoft,  I worked at LinkedIn. One cool thing I did there was introduce a quick help widget on LinkedIn's flagship–used by 1.5 million daily users. I built the core functionality where you can move it around the screen without any lag which was technically challenging because I actually had to go beneath the framework that was used at the time and write that in Vanilla Javascript to get these speeds.

My software engineer experience also includes extensive work on graph traversal algorithms, some machine learning experiments, and mentoring teams of engineers.

In my next role, I’m looking for established large-scale tech companies with meaty product engineering challenges and a team of engineers who need a blend of empathy and leadership.

I can go into more detail for whatever you’d like to hear more about.